Latest News - Page 2844

We now know that Grand Theft Auto V is coming to next-gen consoles and PCs, but what will the limitless technology in PCs be capable of playing GTA V at? Well, Rockstar has outlined some of the improvements to GTA V on PC on a blog post about the game.

The studio said that Grand Theft Auto V for PC will have "across-the-board graphical and technical improvements to deliver a stunning new level of detail. Increased draw distances, finer texture details, denser traffic, and enhanced resolutions". Not only that, but next-gen console owners and PC gamers can also expect "new wildlife, upgraded weather and damage effects, and an array of new details to discover".

Rockstar has teased GTA V on Steam, where it also promises that the PC version of the massively popular game will be "packed with layers of new detail" that will also include "all new content and gameplay created and released since the launch of Grand Theft Auto Online including new Jobs, an arsenal of new weapons, scores of new vehicles, new properties and player customizations". PC gamers will also be excited to hear that they will receive an exclusive video editor designed for "advanced movie making".

E3 2014 - Palmer Luckey, the founder of Oculus VR, has had some absolutely beautiful words to say about the world of 30FPS gaming - which seems to be the center of the console world, even with the next-gen consoles in the Xbox One and PS4.

At E3 2014, Luckey was interviewed by LinusTechTips, where they asked what Luckey what he thought about 30FPS gaming, to which he replied with a very simple, but very precise: "it's not a good artistic decision, it's a failure". Personally, I 100% agree with Luckey, and have been a huge pusher of high refresh rate screens for quite some time. For the last 5 years or more, I have run 120Hz panels for gaming, as I cannot go back to 60Hz - no matter the panel, even at 4K.

It's great to see Luckey taking a huge stab here - but that quote is just glorious. 30FPS gaming does suck, and we're not sitting here laughing at everyone who doesn't have the hardware to run it, but once you do - 60FPS (or higher) and even more, 120FPS+ is where it is at. With the right panel, and a game that can truly handle 120FPS+, it is glorious.

Apple iPhone owners already pay a steep price to have an iPhone, but according to Raymond James analyst Tavis McCourt, consumers are willing to pay an even higher premium when it comes to the iPhone 6.

We've heard that there will be a 4.7-inch and 5.5-inch version of the next-gen iPhone, but McCourt believes that the larger model will carry a $100 premium, and that consumers are willing to pay the premium for the slightly larger iPhone. He said: "Our June consumer survey points to continued growth in the willingness of iPhone users to pay $100 more for a bigger screened iPhone, with now a full one-third of survey respondents willing to pay a $100 premium".

McCourt continued: "data seems to suggest meaningful demand for a larger screen, which should logically mean the iPhone 6-cycle will be strong for upgrade sales, which combined with modest contribution from wearables should cause a modest acceleration in revenue growth in fiscal 2015". With the iPhone 5S still selling for $600+, the new 4.7-inch iPhone 6 would have to debut at the same price of around $600-$700, meaning that the 5.5-inch version would be hitting the $800 mark - if Apple doesn't debut the new iPhone models at a cheaper price. Are you willing to pay that much for the new, bigger iPhone?

The VR space is definitely heating up, with Oculus VR wanting to get its Rift headset into as many consumers' hands as possible - but what about Sony's PS4-exclusive VR headset, Project Morpheus?

Well, Sony is beginning to tease the specifications inside of its VR headset, something that should arrive with a 5-inch 1920x1080-pixel panel, with 90-degrees field of view. Where it'll get interesting, is that the PS4 game that the VR headset is rendering, will have to be running at 1920x1080 - which nearly half or more of the games on PS4 do not - and at a very high frame rate.

The increased FOV also doesn't help, as there are more things to render because of the higher field of view - so Sony is going to run into a few problems here. Anton Mikhailov, an Engineer from the Magic Lab in PlayStation's R&D group has said: "It is a tricky balance between all of these things. "Essentially, for a given resolution, let's take 1080p. It's a good sweet spot for developers: 1080p/60, it's a target they understand. If you go with 1080p/60, FOV over 100°, the pixel density starts to be quite low. So it starts to be hard to read text, stuff like that. So I feel for 1080p, [FOV of] 90°, 100° is a good sweet spot. If the screen res goes up, you can start to have higher FOVs. So I think there is a balancing game there. We're trying to make the most balanced system we can".

Do you want some bitcoins and have a minimum of $200,000 for a deposit? If so, prepare for the U.S. federal government's auction of bitcoins that once belonged to the defunct Silk Road black market website.

The U.S. Marshals Service is spearheading the auction, and all interested parties must register by June 23. The auction itself begins on June 27 and will run for 12 hours. Everyone participating must submit a registration form, copy of a government-issued photo ID, and a wire transfer deposit. The 30,000 bitcoins are valued around $17.3 million currently exchanging at $600 per bitcoin. It appears the federal government has monitored the value of bitcoin and has tried to time the auction at a time when bitcoin value appears to be rising yet again.

The feds also seized another 144,336 bitcoins that belonged to Silk Road head Ross William Ulbricht, however, he is contesting their forfeiture. Interestingly, Ulbricht's attorney argues that bitcoin isn't real currency, and says charges should be dismissed and the cryptocurrency should be returned.

Actor Harrison Ford is best known for his role in Star Wars as Han Solo. Ford is part of the cast for the new Star Wars films and was on set recently when reports indicate that he was injured. Reports from the set of the film indicate that a hydraulic door used on the set fell down and hit him while he was working.

Medics on the set assessed his condition immediately and chose to have Ford airlifted to a local hospital for more treatment. The injury was reportedly to Ford's ankle.

Ford is believed to have suffered a fracture to his ankle. No other major injuries were noted. For now there is no word on how long filming might be delayed. The set will be checked again to ensure the safety of the actors.

Everything is getting smart these days from our phones to our watches. A new smart cup has turned up from a company called Mark One that is called the Vessyl. The smart cup has some interesting abilities. It knows what you put inside and can break the liquid down to its most vital components using sensors inside the cup.

The goal of the cup is to help us change how we consume liquids during the day. The cup can monitor caffeine and sugar amounts and tracks calories. It also has a proprietary hydration measurement that it tracks called Pryme. All of these metrics that the cup can record are synced with an app on your smartphone.

Vessyl has a sting of lights on the side of the cup that will glow to give you an indication of how drinking the liquid you place inside will help or hurt your hydration level during the day. Mark one plans to sell Vessyl via its own website. It has pre-orders going now on its website and the cup can be ordered for $99. Retail price once the cup hits market will be $199. Plans are for the first batch to hit the market in early 2015.

E3 2014 - VR will be mainstream in the coming years, and with the power of Facebook behind it, Oculus VR are going to be at the center of the VR storm. But during an interview with Ars Technica, Oculus VR's CEO Brendan Iribe had some great things to say about the first consumer Oculus Rift headset, where he hopes to see "just north of 1 million units" sold.

Where will Facebook's influence in the Rift come into play? Well, it will help with the pricing of the Rift, with Iribe saying that Mark Zuckerberg wants to ignore margins wherever possible, pushing the price of the Rift down to get them into the hands of as many consumers as possible. Iribe added: "I do too. But at the same time, we were planning to run a business, hopefully a break-even [or] profitable business off of this, not a money-losing business. Mark is much more in the mindset of 'Let's get this to scale with the best quality product at the lowest cost possible".

When the second consumer Oculus Rift is ready to hit the hands of consumers, Facebook's influence will be felt much more, as "It is going to allow us to deliver a much better consumer V2, that's for sure," according to Iribe. He continued: "There's a lot of rich content being made, but we need a lot more of it. As Mark says, as you start to get to race to scale there are a lot of opportunities to monetize that are really great for consumers, because they get a really low-cost product".

Nick Shih, legendary overclocker who now works with ASRock, has just posted on his wall a CPU-Z screenshot validating one of the biggest overclocks I've seen in quite sometime: an Intel Core i7-4790K CPU clocked at an incredible 7GHz, or 7003.38 MHz.

Shih used the ASRock Z97 OC Formula motherboard to get there, and a huge 1.792V on the CPU to reach the milestone. The Core i7-4790K used was an Engineering Sample (like most for these overclocks) with two cores disabled. But still, 7GHz! Wow.

The picture above is what Shih is working with, just as a teaser. Shih has even teased that 7.2GHz "is coming" - we await your overclocking skills, Nick!

The Walking Dead is one of the hottest shows on TV right now, but when the showrunner for the hit AMC zombie show, Scott M. Gimple, came out recently saying that The Walking Dead could run for 10 seasons or more, he was hitting headlines all over the world - well, it turns out he wasn't far from the truth, if anything, he was a little behind.

David Alpert, a Producer on the show, has agreed with Gimple's statements about the longevity of The Walking Dead at the Produced By conference this week. He talked about the advantages on working on a series that has preexisting material, such as The Walking Dead, and while Gimple may have been talking vaguely about the potential of it running for so long, even with an entire new cast coming into the show, Alpert said that The Walking Dead's producers have a very clear path of how they would get there.

Alpert said: "I happen to love working from source material, specifically because we have a pretty good idea of what season 10 is gonna be. We know where Season 11 and 12...we have benchmarks and milestones for those seasons if we're lucky enough to get there".

Samsung has been trying to shake that plastic feel from its smartphones and tablets for a little while now, but the South Korean giant has just made its premium line of tablets official - welcome to the Galaxy Tab S, people.

The new Galaxy Tab S series of slates from Samsung come in two sizes: 8.4- and 10.5-inch models, both featuring Samsung's Super AMOLED displays with a massive 2560x1600 resolution on each tablet. The 10.5-inch model features the largest Super AMOLED display that Samsung has ever used in a mobile device, but the 8.4-inch model knocks it down to a PenTile subpixel matrix, but keeps the 2560x1600 resolution.

Both of the new Galaxy Tab S slates are just 6.6mm thin, which is thinner than both of Apple's slates, the iPad Air or iPad Mini with Retina, and they're also lighter, too. Even with this lightweight design, the new S slates feature massive batteries, with the 10.5-inch model packing a 7,900mAh battery, while the 8.4-inch still crams in a respectable 4,900mAh battery.

Intel has been in court in the EU this week to challenge a fine levied against it totaling 1.06 billion Euros or $1.44 billion. The fine was levied against Intel five years ago and Intel has been appealing the fine ever since. The second highest court in the EU says that regulators weren't overly harsh with the massive fine.

The original decision was handed down when the European Commission ruled that Intel had tried to block some PC makers like Dell and HP among others from buying processors from rival AMD. The competition authority in the EU also ruled that Intel paid a retail chain in Germany called Media Saturn Holding to stock PCs in its locations with Intel chips inside only.

The court Intel was in was located in Luxembourg and it backed the Commission's decision Thursday. "The General Court considers that none of the arguments raised by Intel supports the conclusion that the fine imposed is disproportionate. On the contrary, it must be considered that that fine is appropriate in the light of the facts of the case," judges said.

E3 2014 - RUN. This is what the trailer to Alien: Isolation tells you to do, and I think once you're in the game, it's going to be something you'll be doing for most of it - running, away from the Xenomorph hunting you down.

If you haven't heard about Alien: Isolation until now, here is what you need to know: you play Ellen Ripley's daughter (Ellen was played by Sigourney Weaver in the various Alien movies) Amanda. Amanda faces down the Xenomorph that her mother eventually gets pitted up again, but Amanda is on a ship, in the dark, seemingly alone.

The video's description teases: "As Amanda, you will navigate through an increasingly volatile world as you find yourself confronted on all sides by a panicked, desperate population and an unpredictable, ruthless Alien. Underpowered and underprepared, you must scavenge resources, improvise solutions and use your wits, not just to succeed in your mission, but to simply stay alive". The best part about Alien: Isolation, for me at least, is that it now supports the Oculus Rift. This has made it a day-one purchase - something it was already - but even more so now. Alien: Isolation launches on October 7 for PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, Xbox 360, Xbox One and PC.

E3 2014 - I wrote a very emotional, but optimistic piece on the acquisition of Oculus VR by Facebook back in March, but one of the best guys I've met in the industry, Nate Mitchell, Oculus VR's VP of Product, has had some great words to say at E3 2014.

Mitchell spoke with Polygon at E3, where he said: "For us, we're all gamers, we're game developers, and if you look at our team, it's 90 percent industry veterans, so we have this big focus on games. We want this to be the best platform for VR games. I think, longer-term, we're all excited about the potential of everything you can do with VR, whether it's film or education or training or communication. Over time, I think you'll see more of that, but it's all really about games, and Facebook is excited about that, too".

One of the better parts of the talk, is that Mitchell said that Facebook has been both hands-off, and hands-on "in the best possible way". He continued: "Part of the Facebook deal is, 'Here's a buffet of resources, take advantage of whatever you want.' On the flip-side, they've also been super proactive in suggesting ideas. So as we've gone and said, hey, we want to bring on Jason Rubin, or we want to build these studios, they've said 100 percent, go for it".

Samsung and Pebble became early supporters of smartwatches, and that decision has paid off with both companies controlling the estimated $96 million market. Samsung has 78 percent of market revenue with its Gear smartwatch, as Pebble is in No. 2 with 18 percent revenue share.

The smartwatch market is poised to explode in popularity, as one in 5 consumers have expressed interest in the technology, according to the NPD research group. The average price of a smartwatch is $189, with prices varying from $160 up to $257 - and 25-34 year olds are most interested in smartwatches.

"The smartwatch market is poised to continue to grow in 2014," said Ben Arnold, NPD executive director of industry analysis, in a statement. "With nearly $100 million in U.S. sales in less than a year, the category is off to a promising start with just two major brands."

The City of San Jose and Intel are working together to help stimulate the local economy and embrace their "Green Vision" efforts by collaborating for Smart Cities USA. City officials hope to embrace the Internet of Things and utilize the Intel Smart City Demonstration Platform so residents have real-time, local data that can help guide their energy consumption and daily activities.

"To help improve quality of life in San Jose, we're exploring new ways of capturing and sharing localized information to our residents," said Kerrie Romanow, San Jose Environmental Services Department director. "With better information, we tend to make better decisions. We're optimistic that the real-time air quality data will help our staff understand how we can positively influence the environment right here in San José as well as regionally and globally."

When people think of Silicon Valley, they tend to think more of San Francisco - but over the next 30 years, the population of San Jose is expected to increase to 1.4 million. Moving forward, the city hopes to continue attracting tech and biotech companies, and launching "smart city" initiatives will continue to draw attention.

A US school has shut down a reading programme because it's scared a book on the reading list will encourage hacker culture.

When Little Brother, by Boing Boing blog editor Cory Doctorow, made the One School/One Book list, Florida's Booker T Washington Public High School decided it would rather cancel the programme instead of let in an allegedly subversive book.

Now Doctorow has responded in a blog post, Ars Technica reports, where he suggests the school's move is political.

Tweetdeck has been compromised by an XSS vulnerability, causing some users to retweet a mysterious line of code.

At first, Tweetdeck said the vulnerability had been fixed but users later reported continuing attacks, such as the code retweets, leading to it being taken offline. It has since returned.

"We've temporarily taken TweetDeck services down to assess today's earlier security issue," the company said. "We'll update when services are back up."

Nimble Storage is expanding its reach into the SSD market by introducing an All-Flash Shelf and a more powerful hybrid-flash array, the CS700, to its portfolio. The combined new solution is capable of scaling up to 500,000 IOPS, 64 terabytes of flash, and a petabyte of capacity.

In conjunction with the introduction of these new products, Nimble is highlighting a set of features for the intelligent handling of data they are dubbing, "Adaptive Flash". This is a combination of the Nimble CASL (Cache-Accelerated Sequential Layout) architecture and the cloud based management software, InfoSight. The CASL technology includes dynamic flash-based read caching, inline compression, and snaphots. And with InfoSight, customers can monitor and manage their Nimble systems via a cloud-based platform.

The Nimble Storage architecture is built to allow for scaling out performance separate of scaling out capacity. To add additional capacity, customers can simply add additional storage shelves. As for increasing performance, by upgrading the compute or adding more SSD's.

Popular restaurant P.F. Chang's reportedly suffered a data breach and customer debit and credit card information is at risk, the restaurant chain recently confirmed. The information was stolen between March and May, however, it's uncertain how many of the restaurant's locations have been affected in the breach.

Law enforcement and financial institutions have contacted P.F. Chang's and a full investigation is currently underway.

"P.F. Chang's takes these matters very seriously and is currently investigating the situation, working with the authorities to learn more," said Anne Deanovic, P.F. Chang's spokesperson, said in a statement. "We will provide an update as soon as we have additional information."